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From “The Offal of the Magazine Trade” to “Absolutely Priceless”: Considering the Canadian Pulp Magazine Collection

2004; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 30; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/esc.2004.0007

1913-4835

Michelle Smith,

Literature and Culture Studies

From “The Offal of the Magazine Trade” to “Absolutely Priceless” : Considering the Canadian Pulp Magazine Collection Michelle Smith University of Alberta The other day I went into one of the Stores in Ottawa to see juSt how bad the situation was here. In the Store, forty-six different kinds of this trash were offered for sale. This is the offal of the magazine trade. No one should have to buy it. No one should be able to buy it. T.H. Goode, Member ofParliament, 1949 This diverse range of magazines and paperbooks , complemented by the behind-the-covers production materials and other archival documentation, creates an absolutely price­ less opportunity to Study Canada’s emerging publishing industry. Michel Brisebois, Rare Book Historianfor the National Library ofCanada, 2002 I n 1949, M ember of Par liam en t T. H. Goode exhorted the Federal Government of Canada to make the sale of both pulp magazines and comic books illegal. Most Members of Parliament concurred with Goode’s exhor­ tation. Positing that the violence and questionable morality associated with pulp fiction and comic-book tales could damage young readers, the Federal Government chose to criminalize the production, sale, and even ownership of pulps and comics. These restrictions eradicated Canadian pulps from the nation’s literary landscape by both preventing the produc­ tion of new materials and discouraging the preservation of existing ones. In 1996, however, the National Library of Canada purchased a former pulp publisher’s archive; this archive now constitutes the only known collection of Canadian pulp magazines. Celebrating their rarity, the Library created a public exhibition in 2002 that was designed to showcase the pulps as artefacts that provide “absolutely priceless” insight into a nearly-forgotten era of Canadian publishing. Clearly, this treatment of the pulps contradicts the 1949 government decision to ban the “offal of the magazine trade.” The radical disparity between the perception of the Canadian pulps in 1949 and ESC 30.1 (March 2004): 101-116 M ichelle D enise Sm ith is a provisional PhD Candidate in English at the University of Alberta. She completed her M A thesis, Criminal Tales as Cultural Trade: The Production, Reception, and Preservation of Canadian Pulp Magazines, in 2003. She is currently developing a digital archive of popular Canadian magazines through the crc Humanities Computing Studio . their current vogue raises the question of cultural legitimacy, the question of how literary value is negotiated by governments, institutions, and read­ ers, as well as how these values can change over time. In this paper, I trace the combination of social, economic, moral, and artistic rationales that determined the low cultural value of pulp magazines during the 1940s; I then go on to consider both the material rarity and perceived importance to social and cultural history that underpin the pulps’ elevated cultural status as an archive at a national institution.1 Part One: The Offal of the Magazine Trade For the first four decades of the twentieth century, Canada imported vast quantities of American pulp magazines. These magazines generated and popularized formulaic genre fiction; indeed, Lee Server argues that the pulp-created genres— science fiction, horror, private eye, Western, superhero— now dominate not only popular litera­ ture but every sort of mass entertainment, from movies and television to comic books. This legacy will remain long after the last of the pulp magazines themselves— haphazardly saved and physically unsuited for preservation— have all turned to dust. (15) Part of their ethos, however, was grounded in representing acts of violence and risqué scenarios that were met with widespread moral disapproval. From a material vantage, several elements of the pulps suggested that they were a form of printed trash. They were mass-produced on cheap pulp 1 In their article “A New Model for the Study of the Book,” Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker argue that texts pass through a “lifecyle” that consists of “five events in the life of a book— publishing, manufacturing, distribution, recep­ tion and survival— whose sequence constitutes a system of communication and can in turn precipitate other cycles” (15). For the purposes of this paper, I have chosen to discuss two distinct points in the lifecycle of the Canadian pulp...